A Well-Read Woman

Prologue

I was working at the American Folklife Center reference desk at the Library of Congress, or LC, as we librarians often call it, when my coworker Peter Bartis stopped by to invite me to an estate sale. He told me that a friend of his, Ruth Rappaport, had died six months earlier, and she had chosen him to be the executor of her estate. She had been a longtime employee of the Library of Congress and retired in 1993, long before I began working there. Her row house, just a block behind the Supreme Court building, was filled with papers, books, and objects she had acquired over her eighty-seven years. Peter told me about Ruth’s life: she had escaped from Nazi Germany as a teenager, lived in Israel during the 1948 war, and worked as a librarian for the US military in Japan and Vietnam during the 1960s. While I wasn’t very interested in acquiring any more clutter for my own home, I was certainly curious about this woman and her long, eventful life.

The estate sale was on a beautiful April day when cherry blossom petals littered the sidewalks of Capitol Hill. Despite my feeble resistance, my boyfriend, Greg, and I bought several of Ruth’s belongings, including a fondue pot, a wooden sugar bowl, an old knitting machine, two obscenely large brass candlesticks, a few silk scarves, two Asian prints, and a Jewish cookbook. At home, and surrounded by her things, I searched for Ruth’s obituary online and found a tribute written by neighbor and Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak.1 Dvorak described Ruth’s adventurous life, her sharp wit, her penchant for regaling others with captivating stories from the stage of her front porch, and her refusal to move out of her home as she aged. Everyone in the neighborhood knew Ruth, and she had friends all over the world.

Ruth continued to hover in the back of my mind for the next few months. Every time I looked at her things in my house, I thought about her and wanted to know more about her life. When I hosted parties, I pointed out to my friends that the ridiculous candlesticks standing at both ends of the couch had belonged to a globe-trotting librarian named Ruth Rappaport. I would tell them, thirdhand, what I knew about her—in, I later realized, my own game of telephone, where I had jumbled the original facts.

A year and a half after the estate sale, I went to the American Library Association’s (ALA) midwinter conference in Seattle and stayed at a hotel across the street from the new Seattle Public Library. My family—my mom and stepfather, my two brothers, their wives, and my three nieces—came up on the train together from Portland to spend the weekend with me. In a family with four librarians spread across three generations, is there any better place for a family reunion than the ALA conference? (“You guys are like a medieval guild,” Greg likes to say.) Like kids in a candy store, we rushed straight to the exhibit hall, where publishers distributed free advance copies of books. Late at night, alone in my hotel room, I thought about all the ALA conferences that Ruth must have attended and wondered whether she had ever run into my grandfather at any of them (or more likely, at a nearby bar). I remembered from Dvorak’s column that Ruth had lived in Seattle when she first came to the United States as a teenager. I imagined her in the 1940s climbing those steep hills, probably in heels, on her way to the stately old public library.

I searched online again for that article in the Post. I found it, but this time I browsed through the other search results. I couldn’t believe what I discovered: a link to Ruth’s oral history at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in DC.2 Was this really her? My Ruth Rappaport? The interview had been recorded just a few weeks before she died of lung cancer. I stayed up well beyond midnight listening to it. I was delighted by her German-accented, rough voice, peppered as it was with Hebrew phrases, curse words, and her hacking cough. I felt as though I were finally meeting her, as if she were speaking from beyond the grave and through my computer to me. Even on the first listen, I could tell she was bullshitting somewhat, exaggerating her connections to famous people, and brushing off her interviewer’s attempts to extract some testimony about the trauma that she undoubtedly experienced as a teenager and young adult. But what I latched on to, more than anything, was this fellow librarian’s memories of reading and her love of books. When asked which authors were her favorites as a teenager, she replied: “Everybody who was forbidden: Lion Feuchtwanger, Max Brod, Leon Trotsky . . . and what we did was we passed around the paperbacks. We read them, and as we finished reading

, we tore up the pages and destroyed them so we wouldn’t get caught.”

Back in DC, I couldn’t wait to talk to Peter about the interview.

“You know I donated her papers there, right?” he said.

I felt so stupid that I hadn’t asked him before. I just assumed that because she had such a turbulent young life, she wouldn’t have been able to save anything from that time.

Peter walked me to his desk and handed me a file of photocopies of Ruth’s ID cards, a job application, and letters she had written from Israel in 1948 while the war for a new Jewish homeland raged around her. The collection comprised only a small sample of the diaries, letters, documents, and photographs he had found in an old metal suitcase in the basement of her house. Most of the items are now at the Holocaust museum’s archive.

That night I read through what he gave me and realized that here was another story, the one Ruth couldn’t or wouldn’t fully tell when she had been interviewed. This was a heartbreaking narrative of a confused, angry young woman, bitter about the lot she had been dealt in life and upset with her futile attempts to find a home, a family, and a career that would satisfy her ambitions after so much loss and upheaval. But somehow she still had that singularly Jewish sense of humor, making screwball wisecracks and laughing at herself, despite her deep melancholy.

In the memorable episode of Seinfeld titled “The Library,” Lieutenant Bookman of the New York Public Library shows up at Jerry’s apartment to investigate his decades-long overdue library book from 1971. The next scene cuts to Kramer and the librarian, appropriately named Marion, shouting “Helloooo!” in the cavernous Fifth Avenue library after hours. Lieutenant Bookman startles them, then strolls up to Marion and tells her, “I remember when the librarian was a much older woman. Kindly, discreet, unattractive. We didn’t know anything about her private life. We didn’t want to know anything about her private life. She didn’t have a private life.”3 The audience roars with laughter: Who would want to know anything about an older librarian’s private life?

Ruth knew that her own life was worth documenting and that her experiences were, as she put it, like something from a novel. While in Israel, she kept a detailed diary with the aim of one day writing a book about her experiences there. For whatever reason, she gave up on that goal, although she continued to sarcastically tell friends in letters “I should write a book” when describing any number of her classic stories.

I repeatedly came across glimpses of Ruth’s reading life in the extensive paper trail she left behind, not only in her papers at the Holocaust museum, but also in other archives and personal collections around the world: a mention of an author here, a title recommendation there, her work as a research assistant for a few authors, an extensive bibliography on German Jews she had written as a library science student, lists of books she ordered for soldiers in Vietnam while chain-smoking late at night. In her application to Berkeley’s School of Librarianship, she wrote that watching book burnings and reading banned books had inspired her to become a librarian. On LC’s internal staff website, I found Ruth’s cataloger code on a list of former employees, searched the catalog for it, and pulled up a list of the many thousands of books she had cataloged or corrected over her twenty-two years there. Mesmerized by the never-ending flood of books that had floated across her desk, I saved the list as a spreadsheet. These were all her books, and she had wanted to share them with the world. Books were the one constant in a life full of trauma and turmoil, and she always turned to them for reassurance, renewal, and solace when she had no one and nothing else. Librarianship was not just a job for her, but her tikkun olam, the Hebrew phrase for “repairing the world.”

Above all, this book is a tribute to a teenage girl who understood the power of forbidden books: that by reading them she would find a way to liberate herself. She devoted the rest of her long life to liberating them for the readers of the world. That includes you.

Part I:

Everybody Who Was Forbidden

LEIPZIG, 1923–1938

Chapter 1

When Ruth Rappaport left Germany at the age of fifteen, she was a completely different person than who she had been just a few years earlier. She remembered herself as a shy young girl, and a photograph reveals that she was cute, with dark, curly hair and a mischievous smile. But by the time she was a teenager, her circumstances had changed dramatically. She had also developed the physical characteristics—frizzy hair, a larger nose—that instantly marked her as a conspicuous foreigner, a Jew, which, to the Nazis, also meant a radical. Shyness, in other words, was no longer an option.